


Momentary Solace

by Sorrel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Gen, gen het, girl!Dean, girl!Sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-04
Updated: 2010-07-04
Packaged: 2017-10-10 09:38:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorrel/pseuds/Sorrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel takes an evening out of his busy schedule of hunting for God to visit the Winchester sisters. There is some talking, and then possibly some cuddling, not that Diana will ever admit it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Momentary Solace

For Castiel, the question of predestination and obedience to fate is much on his mind, these days. As an angel, it is built into his very being to obey God; that is his entire purpose in Heaven and on Earth. Not just to obey God, but to obey his older brothers and sisters who God set above himself and his siblings, because it was his father's wish and his duty to do so.

And yet he is here, in this tawdry human motel room and this frail human shell, instead of massing with his brothers and sisters, preparing for war. These two small mortal lives before him are choosing to try and find a way out of fighting for either side, and Castiel finds that despite his nature, he cannot help but follow their example. Perhaps he is simply bowing to a different external whim, following the way of the Winchester instead of the way of Heaven, but he doesn't think so. As much as it pains him to admit it, he is in his current situation entirely of his own volition.

"Hey, Cas," says Diana, her voice a low, gravelly whisper. Sometimes she doesn't feel him arrive, but sometimes, she does. He's learned that the harder he tries to shield from her perception the easier she can notice his presence, as if the more angelic he behaves the greater her awareness, branded into his skin in the shape of his hand. Early in their acquaintance he chose to drop his shields entirely, in order to gain the element of surprise, badly needed in any encounter with this stubborn mortal woman. Now, Castiel is simply grateful that she can sense him at all. If she still notices with more than her eyes when he enters a room, than he cannot have fallen too far.

"Hello," he says back, because he has learned that humans like these social niceties, however much Castiel finds them to be a waste of time. His voice comes out too-loud in the quiet room, and Diana flinches in response, bringing a finger to her lips as she looks down at her sister's sleeping body lying next to hers.

"Shh. I just got her to stop reading and lie down like half an hour ago."

"I will be quiet," he promises, matching his tone to hers. Sam is curled tightly to Diana's side, her cheek pillowed on her sister's stomach just above the sharp ridge of hipbone, one leg thrown possessively over Diana's knee. The fall of her chin-length hair obscures her features, but Castiel can see Diana's hand resting with equal possessiveness on the top of her head, one thumb methodically smoothing a single lock of hair away from Sam's forehead, over and over again.

Someone less familiar with the Winchesters might assume that Sam holds so tightly to her older sister because she's in need of comfort, but Castiel is no stranger and he knows that Sam is in that position not because she needs comfort, but because she is giving it. The fact that Diana allows her the privilege means that she is not as damaged as he had begun to think. This is a relief; he can still remember Famine's words to her among the carnage of the diner.

"Still no luck with God?" Diana asks. She sounds like she's laughing. Castiel doesn't think she finds the matter any funnier than he does, but he is also coming to understand her need to make a joke out of the worst things in her life.

"He is not in Haiti," Castiel sighs. "I had hoped… our Father is sometimes drawn to alleviate human suffering… but no."

Diana's expression is a study in doubt, but out of courtesy, she doesn't say it aloud. She doesn't have to. He does not need to read minds to know that she doesn't believe in God's benevolence toward his children, and in all fairness, he can understand why she feels this way. Even his brothers and sisters lack faith. In truth, he himself was beginning to doubt, until he felt his father's hand bringing him back from the oblivion into which Raphael had delivered him. God loves them all, and God will right the wrongs his oldest children have wrought on the Earth, if Castiel can but find him.

When she does speak, it's with a laughing glare and mock-rebuke. "You mean to tell me that while we're freezing our asses off here in Minnesota in March, you're hanging around the Caribbean?"

When Castiel first descended and took a host, he would not have understood her reference, because all of Earth's lands looked the same to him. But now he can say, "It was not a vacation," which gets a grimace from Diana in response. She looks like Jimmy's child Claire, when she was younger and asked to eat some hated food.

Castiel tries not to think about Jimmy Novak. Too long around Diana has taught him to understand the wrong thing that he did in taking the man as a host; now it is too late for anything but regrets.

"But at least you were warm," Diana sighs.

"I am always warm," he tells her, surprised that the doesn't know this. "Even in this body I not feel the cold, any more than I do pain." That is less true than it was once, but still, he can feel no difference between the snowy winter air and the island he stood on this afternoon.

Diana immediately thrusts out one imperious hand. "Let me feel."

Despite his travels throughout the last several months, Castiel has never met another human so greedy for touch. Even when Diana didn't trust him, back when the breaking seals were their only concern, she still touched him all the time, her fingers mockingly straightening his tie, and arm around his shoulders, her elbow brushing his as they walked. Her touch always felt like it burned as surely as his brand on her body. He gives her his hand.

"I am so jealous," she announces. "First thing tomorrow, we are making tracks south till I can feel my toes again."

"Then you completed your case," Castiel concludes. He feels a little left behind, even though she and Sam were partners for many years before Castiel was given the duty to retrieve her soul from Hell, and regardless, he is the one who wanders. Still, he would have liked to be there when they burned out the nest of minor demons that took over this tiny lakeside town.

"Like taking candy from a baby," Diana grins. "A very large, angry baby with too many teeth, okay, but we did the job and got out okay. And if I can ever fall asleep, I'll even be good to drive us out of here."

Castiel surveys the bed. "Perhaps if you had a blanket."

"Then Sam wouldn't be able to breathe," Diana says logically, and Castiel knows that she won't take kindly to the suggestion that she wake Sam up and make her move. She would say that she doesn't want to "disturb Sam's beauty sleep" or something similar, but he knows that she doesn't want to give up the feeling of Sam's longer body curled so trustingly against hers. Diana has a strangely adversarial relationship with comfort at times, he's aware, but he is still learning to negotiate those troubled waters.

So he, operating under Diana's same logic, methodically takes off his coat and his tie under her curious gaze and, slowly, waiting for her protest, climbs onto narrow bed next to her. She says nothing, even when he cautiously slides one arm underneath her head to bring her body flush against his.

"Sleep," he says lowly, and tries to keep it from sounding like a command. She doesn't react well to those. "I will keep watch."

She nods, silently, and lets her head come to rest in the hollow of his shoulder. "You're so warm," she says wonderingly into his shirt, and as he watches, the slow stroke of her thumb on Sam's forehead slows to a halt.

Castiel stays very still, and keeps watch.

.end.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the song "Disappearing Man" by Dave Carter and Tracey Grammar.
> 
> _Long now he's borne his heavy armor resting/ Only in his sorrows and his noble-nosed regrets/ Some light, some momentary solace/ And he'll ride off gay and lawless as the moment that you met._


End file.
